In New Views of Borderlands History, Robert H. Jackson, the volume editor, examines the two colonial frontiers that constituted the Spanish North American borderlands. The first comprised the Californias, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Texas, which were extensions of central Mexico. The second was La Florida, which developed out of the Spanish Caribbean complex. The thrust of his argument, I think, is that while these regions emerged from different colonial complexes, they shared a “common thread” —the “effort to recreate on the frontier patterns developed in central Mexico” (p. 227).
The volume shuns a general synthetic approach, being structured instead around chapters on particular regions or themes written by specialists on these topics. The essays are in the main straightforward, each seeming to obey an unarticulated set of expectations about themes to treat and order to follow.
Jackson’s brief introduction is followed by chapters by Susan Deeds on colonial Chihuahua; Ross Frank on New Mexico; two chapters by Jackson, one on the Pimeria Alta and the Californias, the other on missions in Alta California and Texas; a chapter by Jesús F. de la Teja on colonial Texas; one by Peter Stern on “marginals” and acculturation; and, in a separate section, a chapter by Patricia R. Wickman on the Spanish colonial Floridas. Jackson’s two-page conclusion rounds out the volume. The chapters vary greatly in quality, with those of Deeds and de la Teja the best of the bunch in terms of their sophistication, breadth, and balance; theirs are also far more carefully written (or more carefully edited) than the other selections. Jackson is overrepresented (there are other scholars, who come readily to mind, to whom he might have turned for treatment of Sonora and Alta California), and Stern’s chapter, while positing some interesting arguments about “marginals” as elements of acculturation, seems out of place in a collection of chapters more narrowly focused on geographic regions. Stern’s chapter is also marred by numerous spelling errors —“chaffing” for “chafing” (p. 158) and, most egregiously since this category is one of the major foci of his argument, “léparos” for “léperos,” the vice-ridden of society (passim). Wickman’s chapter seems little more than an afterthought. Its two major arguments—that pre-contact society was dynamic and that the traditional image of colonial Florida as a “starving garrison outpost” is overdrawn—break little new ground. Indeed, she seems to overreach when, in attempting to counter the “starving outpost” stereotype, she asserts that Spanish society “flourished, abbreviated only by geography and resources” (emphasis added). Surely the limitations of geography and resources are major factors, not simply incidental elements that affect the development of society; and “flourish” is far too strong a term to apply to colonial Florida at any point in its existence.
So what is new in these “new views” of the borderlands? Not, surely, the act of bringing together these two distinct frontiers in one treatment; this has been far more ably accomplished by David J. Weber in his The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992). Indeed, one could question whether Jackson succeeds at all in linking the two northern borderlands, despite his protestations to the contrary. While his introduction emphasizes the inclusion of Florida, his conclusion deals exclusively with the northern frontier of colonial Mexico. Has the Spanish southeast suddenly become too insignificant to the editor to even mention as he wraps up the loose ends of the volume? Nor does Jackson expand the conceptualization of Spanish borderlands to include other peripheral regions of the Spanish empire, as some scholars are beginning to do. The Spanish South American borderlands, for example, are nowhere to be seen.
It is difficult, in fact, to discern anything new in New Views of Borderland History. There are no new theoretical approaches broached, no new findings articulated (at least for those readers who have basic working knowledge of the scholarship on the Mexican north), no seamless picture emerging of the swath of territory reaching from the Californias to La Florida. Contrary to Jackson’s assertion that chapters by specialists will provide a richer understanding of the regions in question, one could as well argue that a more generalized overview might recognize the points of similarity and disjuncture among the various frontier regions—that the overly particularistic view offered here, which tends to reify certain local experiences at the expense of the general, allows for no sense of the whole. Weber’s The Spanish Frontier in North America, referred to above, remains a far more satisfactory treatment of the northern edge of empire.